Noise cancellation is a crucial feature for acoustic echo cancellers when operating in high noise environments, such as the mobile telephone environment. For example, the ambient noise in an automotive environment is higher than that in other environments due to engine and road noise. Due to the elevated noise level the voice signal can become unintelligible. Under these conditions noise reduction can significantly improve the voice quality of a call.
The most common and effective method for noise reduction is spectral subtraction as described in J S. F. Boll: “Suppression of Acoustic Noise in Speech Using Spectral Subtraction”, IEEE Trans. on Acous. Speech and Sig. Proc., 27, 1979. pp. 113-120, the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference. However, the spectral subtraction requires a transform (FFT or DCT are commonly used) to separate speech and background noise in a spectral transform domain. The noise spectrum is subtracted in each spectrum sub-band so that clean speech can be preserved. These transforms require a lot of computation power and are therefore costly to implement.